George Bernard Shaw

• 1. Introduction

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  George Bernard Shaw refused his own first name. He insisted on being called Bernard Shaw, dropping the George after 1876. He wrote more than sixty plays across a career that ran from the 1880s until his death, and the word Shavian entered the English language to describe both his ideas and the way he expressed them. He is regularly rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare.

  Yet the man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 also praised Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, and once wrote that there are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated. He promoted eugenics, opposed vaccination, and refused all state honours. How does a writer hold a country's affection while denouncing both sides of a world war as equally guilty? And what made a Dublin boy who hated all four of his schools into the leading dramatist of his generation? The answers run through music, poverty, a borrowed reading room, and a saint.

• 2. Shabby-Genteel Poverty

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  Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin, the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, known as Bessie. His two elder siblings were Lucinda Frances and Elinor Agnes. The family belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, though George Carr Shaw was among its less successful members, an ineffectual alcoholic pensioned off from a civil service sinecure in the early 1850s.

  Bessie married George in 1852, in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. She came to despise her often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later called a life of shabby-genteel poverty. The young Shaw recalled that his mother's indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply.

  Music was the household's saving grace, and its source was George John Lee, a flamboyant figure in Dublin's musical circles. Lee was a conductor and singing teacher; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice trained in his unorthodox method. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father, a question on which Shavian scholars reach no consensus. In 1862 Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house at No. 1 Hatch Street, plus a country cottage on Dalkey Hill overlooking Killiney Bay.

  Between 1865 and 1871 Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. Schools and schoolmasters, he later wrote, were prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing their parents. In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, rising quickly to head cashier. Then in June 1873 Lee left Dublin for London and never returned, and a fortnight later Bessie followed him with her two daughters.

• 3. The Reading Room Years

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  Early in 1876 Shaw learned that his sister Agnes was dying of tuberculosis, and in March he travelled to England for her funeral. He never again lived in Ireland and did not visit it for twenty-nine years. His mother let him live free of charge in her South Kensington house, but he still needed an income, and Lee found him work ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet.

  For self-education Shaw secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room, the forerunner of the British Library, and spent most weekdays there reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was an unfinished blank-verse satire on a religious theme. His first completed novel, Immaturity, written in 1879, was too grim for publishers and did not appear until the 1930s.

  A brief stint at the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879 to 1880 brought rapid promotion, but when Edison merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to stay. For the next four years his writing earned a negligible income, and his mother subsidised him. In 1881, partly for economy and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian. That same year an attack of smallpox left a facial scar that he later hid behind a beard.

  His novels kept failing to sell. The Irrational Knot of 1880 and Love Among the Artists of 1881 found no publisher, and were later serialised in the socialist magazine Our Corner. At the Zetetical Society in 1880, a group devoted to the search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race, he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant educating himself just as Shaw was. The two recognised something in each other at once. You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know, Shaw later reflected, with brains enough to learn from one another.

• 4. Permeation And The Fabians

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  On the 5th of September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. He read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics, then turned to the Social Democratic Federation, where he discovered Karl Marx and spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He found the federation's founder, H. M. Hyndman, autocratic and ill-tempered, and declined to join, preferring to work with his intellectual equals.

  A tract titled Why Are The Many Poor? drew Shaw to the recently formed Fabian Society, whose meeting he attended on the 16th of May 1884. He became a member that September and before the year's end had written the society's first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He recruited Webb and the orator Annie Besant, and joined the executive committee in January 1885.

  Attending the British Economic Association from 1885 to 1889 moved Shaw away from Marxism toward gradualism, an experience Holroyd called the closest Shaw had ever come to a university education. After a Trafalgar Square rally was violently broken up on the 13th of November 1887, remembered as Bloody Sunday, he became convinced of the folly of challenging police power. He embraced Webb's principle of permeation, the idea that socialism could best advance by infiltrating people and ideas into existing parties.

  In 1889 the society's profile rose with Fabian Essays in Socialism, which Shaw edited and to which he contributed two essays. His essay Transition argued that the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone. In 1890 his Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, assured readers that socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions.

• 5. The Critic Called G.B.S.

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  The mid-1880s marked a turning point. Shaw had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane Patterson, a widow some years his senior; their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. In the same span his two final novels appeared, Cashel Byron's Profession and An Unsocial Socialist, neither a commercial success, and he began earning his living as a critic.

  Through the influence of the critic William Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers, and when Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886, he secured the post for Shaw. The two figures Shaw most admired in the art world were William Morris and John Ruskin, whose emphasis on morality matched his own rejection of art for art's sake and his insistence that all great art must be didactic.

  Music was where Shaw made his name as a critic. He became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto, then moved to The World in May 1890, writing a weekly column as G.B.S. for more than four years. In the 2016 Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson wrote that Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability. Those collected criticisms run to more than 2,700 pages, covering the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950.

  He was fiercely partisan, promoting Wagner and decrying Brahms and the British composers Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian. He demanded music criticism a non-specialist could read, avoiding what he called Mesopotamian words like the dominant of D major. From 1895 to 1898 he was theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris, contributing more than 150 articles and assessing more than 212 productions. He championed Ibsen when many found him outrageous, and rated Oscar Wilde above all contemporaries as our only thorough playwright.

• 6. From Arms And The Man To Pygmalion

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  Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success. Widowers' Houses, built from an aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer, was staged twice in London in December 1892. The Philanderer waited until 1905 for a stage production, and Mrs Warren's Profession, written in 1893, reached the stage nine years later.

  Arms and the Man in 1894 was the play that first brought him money. A mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising love, military honour, and class, it drew press complaints of mediocrity and overlength, but the public crowded extra matinees, and it earned him 341 pounds in royalties in its first year. That sum let him give up his salaried post as a music critic. In the cast was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a relationship between 1890 and 1894 that Jenny Patterson much resented.

  In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman he had met through the Webbs, who had proposed marriage the year before. He married her on the 1st of June 1898 in the register office in Covent Garden; both were aged forty-one. The marriage, generally believed never consummated, was in the biographer St John Ervine's view entirely felicitous. In 1906 the couple found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, renamed it Shaw's Corner, and lived there for the rest of their lives.

  At the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, the company of J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker staged fourteen of Shaw's plays over five years from 1904. The first, John Bull's Other Island, was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much he broke his chair. Man and Superman succeeded in 1905, followed by Major Barbara, contrasting arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army, The Doctor's Dilemma on professional ethics, and Caesar and Cleopatra, his counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

  Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play at 622 performances. Then came Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna before its British opening in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. The English press, Shaw complained, customarily declared each new play of his dull, blasphemous, and financially unsuccessful, which was why Vienna and Berlin demanded his work first.

• 7. The Saint And The Strongmen

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  Heartbreak House, written in 1916 to 1917, was Shaw's first major postwar work, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic found it about an hour too long. His largest-scale work, Back to Methuselah, a cycle of five plays staged in 1922, depicted evolution from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD. At sixty-seven, having poured himself into this Metabiological Pentateuch, he expected to write no more plays.

  Then Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. Shaw had long found Joan interesting, his view veering between half-witted genius and someone of exceptional sanity. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and it was premiered on Broadway that December and enthusiastically received. Even the Nobel committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan, in the words of his biographer Stanley Weintraub. The 1925 literature prize praised work marked by both idealism and humanity. Shaw accepted the award but rejected the money, saying his readers and audiences provided more than sufficient for his needs.

  His politics darkened across the same years. In 1922 he welcomed Mussolini as the right kind of tyrant. In 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor to the Soviet Union, met Stalin, and described him as a Georgian gentleman with no malice in him. When the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933 he called Hitler a very remarkable man, a very able man, and professed himself the only writer in England scrupulously polite and just to Hitler. In a New York Times report of the 10th of December 1933 he praised Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin together as men trying to get something done.

  Though Shaw despised Hollywood, he entrusted the film rights of Pygmalion to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw provided the screenplay and won an Academy Award, which he called an insult coming from such a source. He became the first person to hold both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study, Anthony Holden noted Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy.

• 8. Ninety-Four Years, Refused Honours

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  Throughout the Second World War, Shaw's earlier plays were revived in the West End while he himself wrote no new one, turning instead to prolific journalism. In 1944 nine of his plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, and Sybil Thorndike. That same year his final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, sold 85,000 copies by the end of the year, though Holroyd judged it a rambling narrative that repeats itself.

  Charlotte's health failed first. Increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, she died in September 1943 after the couple had moved back to Whitehall Court for easier medical help. Shaw himself developed pernicious anaemia, treated with injections of concentrated animal liver, a breach of his vegetarian creed that distressed him and drew condemnation from militant vegetarians.

  In 1946, the year of his ninetieth birthday, Shaw accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras in London. When the British government asked informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit, he declined, believing an author's merit could only be settled by the posthumous verdict of history. He had taken dual British-Irish nationality in 1934 while remaining a British subject all his life.

  Shaw kept writing into his nineties. His last works included Buoyant Billions in 1947, the puppet play Shakes versus Shav in 1949 in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults, and Why She Would Not in 1950, written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday. He died at ninety-four of renal failure brought on by injuries from a fall while pruning a tree at Shaw's Corner. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on the 6th of November 1950, and his ashes, mixed with Charlotte's, were scattered around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.